After eliminating all other possibilities, the one remaining-no matter how unlikely-must be the truth.

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Alarm Clocks

So on Friday, I had a 11am meeting. I set my alarm clock to go off at 9:23am (the reason of :23 is just because when I’m changing the hours, sometimes I hit the minute button on accident, and so far it’s been 3 mistakes since my last reset to 12:00). When the alarm went of, I hit the snooze 3x:

Once at 9:23am
Once at 9:32am
Once at 9:41am

At this point, I decide that I want an extra hour of sleep, and change my alarm clock to go off at 10:23am. However, the alarm clock doesn’t go off till 10:50am. After showering and getting dressed, I ended up 20+ minutes late to work, all the time I’m wondering why the alarm didn’t go off at 10:23am. Could I have been so asleeped, I hit the snooze button 3x without realizing it (I’ve done that before).

However, the more I think about it, the more I understand what really happened (and could explained why I was late to one of my finals back in college).

There needs to be a way for the clock to remember when to set off the alarm in the case of multiple snoozes. I’m guessing it remembers the delta between the alarm clock time and the next alarm. So when I hit snooze at 9:41am, the next alarm would be at 9:50am, giving it a delta of 27 minutes. However, when I change the alarm clock time, the alarm was not turned off, meaning the snooze wasn’t reset. So when 10:23am came around, it remembered the snooze delta and didn’t go off till 10:50am.

I haven’t tried this again to prove this, and I don’t know if that’s how it works with every alarm clock, but if you have time, I’d like to hear how your alarm clock works in this situation.